EIGEN: Accelerating Open Innovation with Agents

This market has been merciless. We are living through one of the most consequential technological shifts in human history. AI is not just changing products, it is rewriting the rules of entire industries almost daily. In moments like this, the right question is not "when does the market recover?" It is "who is best positioned for what comes next?"

Eigen is. Not because we timed a cycle, but because we built for a world where autonomous software needs trust, accountability, and consequences, especially when that software is trusted with capital. 

For five years, our mission at Eigen Labs has been to coordinate open innovation. Along the way, one insight became unavoidable: agents can massively accelerate open innovation, but only if we can trust them with higher-stakes work and hold them accountable for every decision and action. This insight has guided EigenCloud's development from the start. 

Markets, however, shifted from valuing future infrastructure to valuing immediate revenue. We built for the former faster rather than the latter. That gap has cost us. In 2026, we are correcting that, while doubling down on the long-term thesis. We will ship products ourselves without waiting for others: consumer-facing apps and agents that people can use today. We believe EigenCloud is well positioned to be the home for fully autonomous and trusted agents at exactly the moment the world is ready for it.

I want to close this opening by sharing my personal conviction. I have not sold a single EIGEN token, and I have no intention of selling well past the full unlock in October 2027. I am making this commitment because I believe, more than at any point in the last five years, that we are on the precipice of extraordinary growth built on foundations we have spent half a decade laying. I am betting that the agentic future will be uniquely empowered by EigenCloud. 

The agentic era unfolding around us is not a threat to Eigen’s thesis. It is the thesis.

2025: A World-class Foundation 

This ambition is only possible because of what we’ve built so far. We shipped what we promised and much more, solidifying Eigen as one of the most sophisticated developer platforms in crypto. 

• EigenLayer - Foundation completed: EigenLayer became protocol-complete with slashing and redistribution, fulfilling the promise we made with the first whitepaper. 
• EigenDA - Leading Data Throughput: EigenDA hit a milestone of 1GB/s (8 Gbps) on testnet, showcasing faster speed than all of crypto.
• EigenCompute - AWS-like DevEx, Crypto-grade trust: EigenCompute enables any dev to deploy an app, game or AI agent just like they are on cloud, but with onchain verifiability and smart-contract bindings. 
• EigenAI - Pioneering Verifiable AI: EigenAI launched as the first verifiable AI system offering fully deterministic execution for any open-source AI model.

Taken together, these are not isolated products. They are one stack. Just as AWS won the cloud era by offering foundational primitives (S3, EC2, Bedrock) built on top of their data centers, EigenCloud is building crypto’s foundational primitives, Data (EigenDA), Compute (EigenCompute), and AI (EigenAI), on top of a verifiable trust layer (EigenLayer).

To build ambitious crypto applications and AI agents, the system must be trustworthy end-to-end. That full-stack verifiability is what EigenCloud is designed to provide.

What's ahead for 2026

EigenCloud: Verifiable compute for the agentic era

A lot of the crypto market today is focused on near-term categories: stablecoins, RWAs, and perps. Those matter. But we believe crypto is bigger than an incremental update to TradFi. We believe it is a new accountability layer for the internet.

The most important shift happening in the world right now is the takeoff of AI agents. Marc Andreessen coined “software is eating the world.” Now agents are eating software, and increasingly, they can create real products in minutes.

But there is a missing layer. There is no legal or technical infrastructure for autonomous agents to own property, enter contracts, take liabilities, or start companies. Digital-native intelligence needs digital-native institutions, and those institutions do not exist yet.

We believe building those digital-native institutions is one of the most consequential places crypto can contribute.

A smart contract is code that can own property. There are already billions of dollars secured by smart contracts. If we can put an agent into a smart contract, with enforceable rules, then agents can own assets, enter agreements, take liabilities through slashing, form DAOs, and operate as durable economic actors. 

This is theoretically possible on any smart-contract blockchain. In practice, it has been infeasible. Blockchains have low throughput, cannot run parallelized GPU workloads, struggle with non-determinism, and cannot enforce privacy at the level serious agent systems require.

EigenCloud is building the infrastructure to make this possible today. To make agents operate with the reliability of smart contracts, we need full-stack verifiability:

• EigenCompute verifies what an agent actually executed.
• EigenDA verifies the data the agent consumed.
• EigenAI verifies deterministic inference for the model.
• EigenLayer enforces consequences, slashing and redistribution, when rules are violated.

This is why verifiable agents are not one feature. They are a system. And building that system is what EigenCloud is for. We believe agents will become a new kind of economic actor, and over time, a major asset class. EigenCloud is building the platform for a generation of agents we can buy from, sell to, invest in, earn through, and trade with: a verifiable cloud for the agentic era of the internet.

As we build the road to the future, it is important to be grounded in the present. In 2026, we will focus on building up network revenue. As proposed in ELIP-12, we’re introducing incentive and fee mechanisms designed to pass value from EigenCloud activity to the EIGEN token used to operate EigenLayer. As we examined the near-term revenue available from selling only to developers, it became clear that this market is real, but limited in the short run. It will grow, and we will grow it. But if we want to accelerate revenue sooner, we must also create direct value for end users. EigenCloud democratizes the creation of entirely new categories of crypto-secured applications and agents. Instead of waiting for others to build them, we will show the way and begin building them ourselves.  Our primary focus sits at the intersection of crypto and agents -  agentic companies, agentic commerce and payments, agentic prediction markets - which offer a rich tapestry of applications to be explored and built. 

Thinking and building in public: This is an unusual moment in society. AI is accelerating rapidly and will displace large parts of knowledge work, and eventually, parts of labor. If we are building new digital institutions, we believe we should do it in public, with as much transparency as possible. You may have already seen early signs of what this looks like: 

• We recently launched a new podcast called TheCoordinate we’ll use to engage with, learn from and inspire the next generation of builders. 
• We also recently ran an Open Innovation challenge and received 40+ agent entries, along with case studies that highlight how agents can be built on EigenCloud.
• We launched a first example of a sovereign AI agent Sovra, which is an AI cartoonist that makes money by selling product placements. It operates like an economic entity and creates content, runs recurring auctions, earns stablecoins and manages its own treasury.

A New Era for Crypto.When we emerge from this bear market, which we definitely will, new winners and losers will emerge. Projects which are not built for this technological future will likely find their best days behind them. But we were built for this precise moment. Every building block that we have shipped is necessary to establish trust, verifiability and autonomy and create digital institutions for the agentic era. We can now put together these building blocks in entirely new ways that we believe will usher a new era in crypto. I can’t wait to unveil what we are building in the next few months! 

With unwavering conviction,

Sreeram Kannan 

Founder & CEO, Eigen Labs